


In The Midst of Life

by Sanguineheroine



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes - fandom
Genre: John is a Very Good Doctor, Life Kink, M/M, Squick, death kink, phrenology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 13:24:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1859634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanguineheroine/pseuds/Sanguineheroine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Watson is trying to live, Holmes would rather be dead – a little death seems to be the best compromise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Midst of Life

**Author's Note:**

> Despite the summary, this isn’t really crack at all. It may, in fact, be a little bit icky for those possessed of a delicate constitution. Not graphic, not necrophilia, but still a little bit on the other side of strange.

Holmes and I spend our lives with the dead. We know death intimately in all its hideous guises; its heavy coldness of limb, its cloying sweet stench of corruption and decay and the last struggling moments when it grasps greedily at life, draining heat away with rushing heart’s blood. We think so often of death that when we are left alone with life, we are discomforted and uneasy. Restive as children in new holiday garb, we pull idly at any loose thread and hope to unravel the weave of our existence to reveal the darkness with which we are more familiar.

Holmes pushes life away. Cowed by the relentless demands of a body too long denied, he chooses instead a simulacrum of the pure state of intellect in which he exists during an investigation; lying in a drugged dreaming for days on end in our darkened sitting room high above the crowded street.

I embrace life, for a little while at least. I wander in the park, enjoying the slow shuffling rhythm of my steps and the simple pleasure of choosing for myself which turning to take, when to stop and when to go on. I eat lunch when I am hungry, I drink when I am thirsty and when I am lonely I seek for company; filling my senses with the taste and smell of sweat and soap and living flesh.

I teach anatomy classes to interns at St Bart’s; lecturing on vascular contraction, impacting injuries and the indicators of arsenic poisoning to fresh-faced young men in dark wool. I perform dissections with the same shining blades that have dug bullets and splinters from Holmes’s flesh; lifting out liver and kidneys, spleen and appendix, heart and lungs. I teach those young minds to admire death; I show them the pale rigid splendour of once-lithe limbs and the rich spills of blood hidden inside the atria and the _vena cava_.

A softly-spoken lad with pale eyes once asked me if I cared to know what inner thoughts and magnificent secrets were once guarded by the diaphanous membranes of the _pia mater_ , but I told him that in death we are all equal. Death, Holmes and I have proved, keeps no secrets.

It is enough; feeling this coolly self-contained brush with death.

Eventually, though, the passenger that sleeps in me; lulled by food and wine and ripe young bodies, must awaken. I feel it yawn and stretch, calling me to search further from home for rougher and ruder company and then drawing me back eventually to the flat where Holmes sleeps like that fabled beauty; awaiting the touch of death, not life, to wake him.

***

His heartbeat is slow on that first night, and his skin is pale and cold; he is a _momento mori_ , posed as carefully as a corpse. Life is indicated only in his eyes, burning dark and wide as those of a tubercular patient and watching me as I kneel beside him to lay my head on his chest and breathe his rank smell of damp wool and chemicals.

It is not my caresses that rouse him, I know. It is the familiar scent of formaldehyde and blood that stirs Holmes’s mind and, in time, his body, from their unnatural slumber. He clings to that bright thread that leads him back to life tenaciously and I am always indulgent, sitting patiently by the copper tub while he bathes, letting him absorb the essence of death from my clothes and my skin.

When he rises shining and flushed from the bath I am already hungry for him but our ritual is strict; he will dry and dress first, and we will drink tea together by the newly-banked fire. It is only when Holmes pushes his cup away and kneels before me that I may touch him; bringing sluggish blood to the surface of his too-pale skin with my tongue and teeth and with my fingernails, cutting scarlet crescents into his hip and sucking livid bruises onto his throat and his solar plexus. Piece by piece he will strip me bare, searching every inch of me for evidence of death; blood that spots my cuffs and trousers, the acrid smell of lye soap and antiseptic on my fingers and the tell-tale racing of my heart that began when I first that day put knife to flesh.

It is a fascination we share; that passion for the discovery of secrets. Holmes searches for his often among the faces of the living – and that is the task befitting his greater intelligence and instinct, for the living are capable of inestimable deviance and prevarication. I speak the language of the life and death of the mortal body, and it tells me no lies. But between Holmes and I, when it is just we two, the roles are reversed: There is no challenge for Holmes in reading my intentions or my desires; he knows both so well and conversely I knew his body intimately long before I ever knew his mind.

So he lies me down on the rug and maps the ruinous topography of my form; those gloriously gifted hands tracing the thick ropy remains of my _vastus lateralis_ and the smooth high curve of my buttocks with equal fervour. He skims the irregular edges of my _scapula_ and follows the silvery-white rows of stitching across my sunburnt skin, circling the shifting rise of each vertebrae and then dragging his fingertips across my scalp.

_Destructiveness_ , he murmurs when his thumb brushes over my ear, and then _Veneration_ when his palm rests over my crown. _Hope_ is Holmes’s long index finger sliding closer to my hairline and when he turns me to face him, he names the two chaste kisses on my brow _Eventuality_ and _Time_. His third kiss, when his hand slides under my jaw and he whispers my name, is for my parted lips.

Holmes takes me apart with those kisses; pulls me open with his lips and hands until I am helpless beneath him, begging him with arched spine and flexing hips to complete what he has begun; to take me with him to that moment when we are suspended together between life and death.

He leads me there slowly, with the thick slide of his cock inside me and the tortuous twisting of his clenched fingers on my flesh. He calls me with endearments; whispering _My darling one_ and _My heart_ and finally a senseless litany of pleading prayers and profanities and my own name. My glory comes to me silently with a hiccup of my heartbeat and a cramping pleasure that blooms outward from my cock to seize my stomach and my chest. I curl up toward Holmes’s body but he pushes me ruthlessly down, hands wet and hot with my seed and with a final thrust he is dying inside me, hips rocking slowly and teeth bared against my neck.

***

Afterwards Holmes is his own bright self again, speaking easily of meeting a new client or of opening an unexpected letter while he strokes my hair and waits for me to return to him. When I turn in his arms and place a hand on his chest he smiles, passing me his cigarette.

_So, Watson_ , he says lightly, _do you suppose that this case shall provide sufficient interest for minds such as ours?_

I make pretence of deep consideration, raising one eyebrow and stroking my chin thoughtfully.

_Holmes_ , I say finally, _I think if anyone can create interest around such a venture, it would certainly be you_. He smiles indulgently at my needling and lights another cigarette, dragging deeply before throwing his free arm wide.

_A new adventure!_ he exclaims, tipping his face to the ceiling. _I do believe, dear boy, that this, as they say, is the life_

As his words, buoyed up by a silver cloud of smoke, drift away from us into the night, I can’t help but agree.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Dear Friends for the phrenology chart.


End file.
